In Self Defense by Susan R. Sloan

intellectual achievement, and success.
    Native Americans didn’t always get a fair shake in this country, even after almost four hundred years of occupation, he often told them.  But that didn’t mean you sat around and cried into your whiskey about it.  And it didn’t mean you sat around and waited for good fortune to drop into your lap, either.  It meant you got up off your butt and went out and made it happen for yourself.
    He was proud of how he earned his living as a cop, but he wanted his children to do better, if they could.  It took.  One of Erin’s brothers was an Indian Rights attorney, two were engineers -- one computer and one mechanical, and the fourth was a veterinarian.  Both of her sisters were teachers.  Erin, the youngest, was the only one who had forsaken college and followed in her father’s footsteps, and she had never really been sure whether he was pleased about that or not.  She didn’t ask him when she could, and now it was too late.  He was killed in the line of duty six years ago next month, four months before he was scheduled to retire.  But what she could do was be the best damn police officer she knew how to be, and for that, she had a great role model.
    The notes in front of her included everything she had been able to lay her hands on about Clare Durant and her husband.  For example, she now knew that Clare was thirty-eight years old and the only child of Gus and Helen Nicolaidis, both deceased.  She also knew that Clare graduated from the University of Washington with a degree in English literature, and that she had worked as an editorial assistant at Thornburgh House from 1997 to 2000.  It wasn't clear in anything Erin had read whether hiring her had been because of a personal connection to the family, but Glenn Thornburgh’s brother had worked for Gus Nicolaidis.
    Clare married Richard Durant in 2000, gave birth to their first child, a girl, two years later, and to their second child, a boy, two years after that.  In the spring of 2010, she went back to work at Thornburgh House, this time as an editor.
    On the other side, Richard Durant was forty-eight years old, and one of five children, three surviving, born to Emma and William Durant of Lacey.  He was a graduate of Washington State University, had gone to work at Nicolaidis Industries in 1995, and married the boss’s daughter six years later.  In 2005, upon the retirement and subsequent death of Gus Nicolaidis, he took over the company for his wife, and had been running it quite profitably ever since.
    In addition to the personal information on the Durants she had gathered, Erin had also compiled a number of facts, observations, questions, and theories relating to the man who had been harassing Clare.  The detective couldn’t help but feel that there was a real sense of urgency here, in part because this was not the first case like this that she knew about.
    Six years ago, about a year before she and Dusty hooked up as partners, Erin recalled, a popular Seattle singer had started receiving the same kind of phone calls that Clare was now receiving, and that less than a month after she first reported those calls to the police, she had been found in an isolated area near Green Lake, raped, mutilated, and murdered by someone who had clearly enjoyed his work.  It was assumed, for lack of a better explanation at the time, that the killer was a deranged groupie, who was suffering from unrequited love.  But then, three years later, there had been an eerily similar case, although the second victim was a West Seattle waitress and not a celebrity.
    The first murder had been well publicized when it happened, but the second had received far less coverage.  Neither Erin nor Dusty had worked either case, but they knew the details of both, and they had always assumed, just like everyone else at the time, that the second victim’s estranged husband had taken advantage of the perfect opportunity to commit a copycat crime.